1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to minimizing the risks in change actions on managed endpoint resources, such as, managed servers in customer information technology (IT) environments. More particularly, the present invention relates to a system and method that acts to allow system users, such as, system administrators to execute specific changes or tasks on managed IT computer resources with minimization of error.
2. Background and Related Art
In making changes on managed IT computer resource, there are a number of ways in which errors in the change actions or commands executed by users, such as system administrators (SA), can occur. These errors may, for example, be from an error in planning a change for a resource. In addition, human error in executing a change on a resource may occur. Such errors may, for example, result in a wrong command being executed. Or, a command may be executed at the wrong time of day, wrong day or on the wrong server.
The impact of an unintended state change of an IT computer resource due to error in execution of a change command may have major consequences. At a minimum, it may be costly in terms of down time, loss of data, interruption of business transactions, interruption of manufacturing processes, interruption of process management and control, and the like. Obviously, the overall cost in terms of correcting for the error can be very large depending upon the criticality and importance of operations being performed by the system.
Typically, tickets are used in IT systems for system incidents, problems and changes, (IPC tickets). However, change tickets normally do not act to ensure that errors in execution, as described above, will not occur.